Senate Republicans just lost their majority, and the man who ran the chamber kept his job without a single rival raising a hand.
His defenders insist the losses had nothing to do with him.
And Bret Baier just read John Thune one verdict his colleagues refused to deliver.
The Leader Who Lost the Senate Kept His Crown Anyway
Senate Republicans watched their majority go up in smoke in the midterms. The Associated Press counted at least seven seats gone, including seats in Kansas and South Carolina that the party usually banks without breaking a sweat. US Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) trailed her Democrat challenger by more than 2,500 votes as Mississippi finished its count, which could push the damage to eight.
Then Republicans handed the man in charge another term.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) won reelection as conference leader by acclamation. No challenger. No roll call. No fingerprints. US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who ran for the job twice before, passed on a third try.
But not everybody went quietly. Fifteen Republican senators voted to delay the leadership election, roughly a third of next year’s conference, according to The Hill.
US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) didn’t hide his irritation. “I, for one, haven’t heard a word from the leader. So it can’t be terribly important to vote today if the leader is not making calls and actually asking people to vote for him,” Hawley said.
US Senator James Lankford (R-OK) offered a shrug instead of a defense. “No one wants that job,” he said of the post.
Maybe so. But a job nobody wants still beats a job nobody fights for, and nobody in that room fought.
Thune summed up the wreckage in one sentence. “Obviously, the election result was not what we hoped for,” he told reporters.
Bret Baier Read the Comment Section Out Loud
Then Thune sat down with Baier on Special Report, and the Fox News anchor brought up something the Senate cloakroom never did.
Baier told Thune a lot of people are angry with him. “Look at your social media. If I post about you, there’s a lot of anger,” Baier said, according to a clip of the exchange circulating on X.
Thune didn’t flinch. “I love the fight . . . I have core values that drive me,” he answered.
Core values make a fine bumper sticker. But the voters filling Baier’s comment section wanted one thing out of the Senate, and they never got it.
The SAVE America Act would require proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote in federal elections. It’s the most basic election integrity measure imaginable: only American citizens should decide American elections. The House passed it. Then it hit the Senate and stalled under the filibuster.
Back in June, Thune explained to Baier exactly why he wouldn’t push harder. “We only got 48 votes; we had that vote last week on all five components. The only way you can obviously get this done is to nuke the legislative filibuster, and that is not something that we have anywhere close to the votes to do,” he said.
The Lunch Where the Mask Slipped
And there’s the part Thune never says on camera.
In June, the Daily Caller reported that Thune told a closed-door GOP lunch that some Republican senators opposed President Trump so strongly they would never vote for the SAVE America Act, no matter what the bill said. The outlet cited several sources familiar with the meeting. Thune’s office flatly denied it. “This is a baseless claim, and it is unequivocally untrue,” a spokesperson said.
Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio described the same lunch as a “pile-on” against US Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), the bill’s Senate sponsor. US Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and John Kennedy (R-LA) challenged Lee’s strategy, according to Desiderio.
Sit with that for a second. If the report holds up, the math Thune kept citing to Baier wasn’t just math. The arithmetic had a grudge built into it.
Lee kept insisting there was a way through. “If the majority leader were to announce we are going to debate this till we pass it, we would get to the point of passage,” he said.
Thune never made that announcement.
Cornyn, for his part, lost his primary to Ken Paxton and then blamed Trump’s unpopularity and voter anger over “corruption” for Democrat James Talarico’s win over Paxton. This is the same Cornyn who backed amnesty and championed Joe Biden’s gun control bill. Compare that to Michigan, where Chuck Schumer and top Democrats lined up behind Abdul El-Sayed after he knocked off their preferred candidate, Haley Stevens. Democrats closed ranks behind their socialist. Republican insiders pointed fingers at the President.
John Thune Rode Into the Senate on an Obstruction Charge
Here’s the twist almost nobody in Washington, DC wants to bring up.
Thune got to the Senate in 2004 by beating Tom Daschle, the Senate Democrat leader. He made the race about one thing: Daschle using his leadership post to block a Republican President’s agenda, especially George W Bush’s judges. Thune won by 4,508 votes, and Daschle became the first Senate party leader to lose his seat in 52 years, according to CNN.
Now the shoe fits the other foot. The leader standing between a Republican President and the voters is Thune himself.
The record didn’t start with the SAVE Act. In December 2020, Thune said challenges to the Electoral College results would “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate. Trump fired back at “RINO John Thune, ‘Mitch’s boy,’” and Thune later showed up at Tim Scott’s May 2023 presidential launch rally to back him in the primary. He endorsed Trump only after the South Carolina primary made the outcome obvious. Public support, private resistance. Same pattern, different decade.
Maybe Thune truly believes the filibuster shields conservatives. Plenty of Republicans do.
But listen to how he put it in another sit-down with Baier. Democrats could change the rules “if at some point they decide they want to steal the car, fine, but we’re not going to hand them the keys to do it,” he said.
Well, Democrats now hold the car, the keys, and the garage. Come January, they’ll scrap the filibuster the moment it stands between them and amnesty for illegal aliens, a packed Supreme Court, or new Senate seats for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. The rule Thune protected will last exactly as long as Democrats find it convenient.
The neoconservatives who pushed the Iran war deserve their own share of the blame for the midterms. NBC News exit polling found 63 percent of voters branding the military action against Iran a mistake, and the lion’s share of them pulled the lever for Democrats.
But a base told for two years that its top priority was impossible doesn’t need a spreadsheet to decide whether to wait in line on a cold November morning.
President Trump called Thune “a very fine man” and said the leadership vote was “up to the Senate.” Senate Republicans made their choice. Baier’s comment section made a different one.
Back in 2004, Thune had a warning for a Senate leader who stood between a Republican President and the voters back home. “His role as chief obstructionist puts him at great peril in this state because I think people are beginning to see that what he describes as clout is really being used in a way that undermines the agenda a lot of people out here believe in,” he said.
Sources: The Conservative Treehouse, “November 11th – 2026 Presidential Politics”; Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, “Senate Republicans vote to keep Thune as leader after election wipeout”; USA Today, “John Thune reelected to lead Senate Republicans despite midterm losses”; The Hill, “Thune elected Senate GOP leader after bruising showdown with critics”; Roll Call, “Thune will lead Republicans through the minority”; CBS News, congressional leadership elections live updates; WLBT, Mississippi Senate results; The Daily Caller, “Thune Admits Some Senate Republicans Hate Trump Too Much To Support SAVE America Act”; The Hill, Thune interviews with Bret Baier; Senate Republican Leader press release, “Thune Joins Bret Baier on Fox News”; CNN, 2004 South Dakota Senate race; Fox News, “Daschle to Voters: I Have D.C. Clout”; The Washington Post, Axios, and The Nation on Thune’s record with Trump; NBC News exit polls
